In recent years, digital language resources have proven to bear a strong potential for revolutionalizing traditional research methods in linguistics and the broadly understood humanities and social sciences. The emerging vision that sees big data opening up new forms of research and generating new insights in these fields necessitates strong computational techniques that are able to process, analyse and visualize language data in a structured and scalable manner, and that are versatile enough to respond to new parameters and domains of investigation.

The Leibniz ScienceCampus “Empirical Linguistics & Computational Language Modeling” aims at the exploration of this promising field of research by bringing together two players with internationally recognized expertise in corpus-based empirical linguistics and computational natural language processing. Within the Leibniz ScienceCampus, the Institute for German Language (IDS) and the Department of Computational Linguistics (ICL) will jointly investigate new research methods in empirical linguistics and natural language processing, by applying them to large-scale corpus resources of different genres and domains. The resulting research methods and adaptive natural language processing models will be employed in advanced applications in the context of Digital Humanities.

The Leibniz ScienceCampus will establish cooperations with strong partners in linguistics and computational linguistics and will foster targeted incubator projects in the humanities and social sciences.